1) The 8400 isn't available. Whether it retails above or below MSRP is yet to be seen.
2) For the foreseeable future the only motherboards available for the 8400 are the expensive premium Z370-based boards.
3) The R5 1600 overclocks out of the box and on a cheap-as-chips B350 board.

As a complete package, the i5 8400 is more expensive than the R5 1600, is significantly slower in multi-threaded workloads, and once OC'ing ability is factored in, isn't any quicker in single-threaded loads either.

Once the cheaper coffee lake motherboards hit the market the 8400 will become a reasonable alternative to Ryzen 5 for certain use-cases, but to propose it at the moment?
It's daft.Reply

At launch you could buy an 8400 for around £180, with ASRock Z370 boards retailing for as little as £109. That's a pretty compelling gaming package.

As I said in the review above, for multi-threaded workloads the 12-threads of Ryzen help, but this appraisal is based on gaming performance, and across the board the Intel is either better or at least the same.

- No player name/position/type labels.
- No grid.
- Skill iconography with no textual representation alternative; this is bad for both newcomers & veterans, and gets worse as your TV increases.
- No indication of dice roll on winnings screen
- Many team's pieces too similar to one-another, making role distinction much harder.
- No visual representation of SPP rank ups.
- Throw range predictor not shown prior to committing to movement.

...and that's just the in-game deficiencies, the menus have a whole load of unique "wtf were they thinking" design issues.

While BB2 is certainly shinier, it fails at the fundamentals; good UI.

While massively disappointing, this should be of no surprise to anyone who has played BB1; even back then Cyanide Studios were rubbish at designing UI. BB2 just reaffirms this complete lack of competency,